The appliance of science ...

By Yoke Har Lee

Rosemary Sharpin and Maxine Simmons started out 15 years ago as laboratory scientists with an entrepreneur's dream to export products.

Starting with funds raised from family members, they put together their first laboratory cum manufacturing set up in an old rickety building in Stanley Street, Auckland. Today, their company, Immuno-Chemical Products Ltd (ICP) is a world leader in biochemical products, with a dominant market share in its field.

ICP manufactures a wide range of products, and it has few direct competitors. The company started out in 1983 manufacturing antibodies. It now makes kits to test milk, products to make cows ovulate, products to assist in embryo transplants and pregnancy tests for cows.

Sharp focus on capturing what the market needs has helped the company move into other growth areas, a main one being hygiene testing products. Ninety per cent of its products are exported to over 35 countries, primarily in Europe, America and Australia.

Co-founder Maxine Simmons, 41, told the Business Herald that the company has been undergoing a growth rate of 25 per cent in the last few years but the management is aiming for even faster expansion. The staff of 25 will grow to 50 under this plan and ICP wants to move within a short time span from being a small firm to a medium-sized company.

In 1983, the two women were working as research scientists when they stumbled onto their business project. "We were working on rheumatoid arthritis, studying the immunological processes in rheumatoid arthritis. In that research we had to purify our own biochemicals to be confident about what we were doing.

"So we originally thought that we would get involved in medical diagnostics because that was what we both understood. But we fast realised that it would be too hard. We would be competing with multinationals.

"So we started looking around at what our strengths were, looking at the environment and using New Zealand's expertise. That was when we realised we could apply what we knew about very sophisticated diagnostics to the veterinary field rather than to humans."

Around 1985, New Zealand went through a goat industry boom - everybody wanted Angora goats. "All the vets in New Zealand seemed to be involved in Angora [embryo] transfers. They were asking for biochemicals to help them with the process. So we started developing a range of products to transplant embryos, then realised there was a good export market that applied to cattle rather than sheep. That's when we started exporting," she said.

From sending products out in chilly bins, ICP now moves products on large pallets. Rosemary Sharpin, who co-founded the company, remembered her first call to potential client Sigma Chemical Company in the US.

"I introduced myself, saying I was Rosemary from New Zealand and the guy asked me again where I was from, then asked me what made me think he would buy something from us. It took a lot of time, the relationship building.

"If they are going to be buying from the other end of the world, it is basically like buying from Mars. They have to get to feel confident that you are going to be able to deliver, that you aren't making it in a mud hut or on top of an ice mountain, that you are a bona fide high-tech operation."

A critical factor for ICP's success is the company's ability to transform technology into a form which is readily usable by the market it serves. ICP's products originate from the marketplace. It is not solely bent on having high-flying technology.

Rosemary Sharpin said: "A critical component (for ICP's success) is our open mind, listening to the customers. We have gone out there to give people the product that they needed, not gone out there with our product and said: 'here, you must need this'. "We spent quite a lot of time and effort looking at how the people might use what we are making in the field and how we can make it easier, more convenient, less hassle, more portable," she added.

Maxine Simmons said: "The technology is just part of the answer. It doesn't just have to be great technology. It has to be technology that the market's ready for. We have to be able to make it into a product. Knowledge and understanding of your market and delivering it in a marketable format, that is the hard work. There is also the issue of protecting it - all those things that go with it," she said.

An indication of how ICP simplifies technology into a practical product is to be found in its range of patented products testing bacteria contamination. The technology behind the product is sophisticated, based on the understanding of rapid bacteria growth.

All the end-user has to worry about is whether or not the sample drawn into a tube changes colour. The product was first developed to test pasteurised cream to find out whether the process had been successful. The technology has since been adapted for use in other food processing industries and also in other hygiene test applications.

Along the road, ICP had learnt some hard lessons, where it had products with technology ahead of its time or where the company hadn't considered the delivery problems.

One example was a product introduced to test mastitis in cows. The technology was great but there were other accompanying issues of sample collection, the delivery of the samples and laboratory tests that went along.
"The product was technically ready five to six years ago but never quite got out there because it was hard to make it work in the market," Maxine Simmons said.

ICP knows that product development is where the future of bio-technology lies.

It is also highly focused on success rates. Maxine Simmons said: "We are small company and we can afford one failure in 10. We are not like the multinationals who can have one success out of 10. So we are taking things with a reasonable chance of success, taking things that are there and applying it to product. We have to stay very focused on the product delivering exactly what is required."